Albin Lohr-Jones/Sipa via AP Images Demonstrators hold aloft signs at the conclusion of a rally near Trump Tower. W hen someone as manifestly unfit for office as Donald Trump can be elected president of the United States, it represents a collective institutional failure. But it is important to keep one crucial fact front and center: The American electorate did not choose him. By the time the vote counting is finished in California, Hillary Clinton will have received roughly 2.5 million more votes than Trump. This is a larger margin than Richard Nixon in 1968 or JFK in 1960 had achieved. The people’s choice did not become president because an indefensible anachronism malfunctioned for the second time in less than two decades. The lessons of this should be clear. In the long term, the Electoral College must be eliminated or circumvented; in the short term, the fact that Donald Trump was not the choice of the American people needs to be front and center to the progressive opposition to...

(Photo: AP/Mark Ralston) Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton debate during the third presidential debate in Las Vegas, Nevada, on October 19, 2016. T he appallingly substance-free media coverage of the 2016 elections, which has revolved around titillating tapes and email snipe hunts, has largely ignored the historically stark policy choices now facing the American public. The nation’s growing polarization has given us a Democrat running on the most progressive platform since 1972, if not ever , and a Republican whose policies would take the country back to the Gilded Age. Admittedly, since Republicans will almost certainly maintain control of the House, the Democratic legislative agenda may be somewhat beside the point. But does this mean, as Kathleen Parker recently argued in The Washington Post , that the election’s outcome is no big deal either way? Not on your life. For progressives, the differences between the best- and worst-case plausible scenarios in the 2016 elections are, as...

The Supreme Court let stand a lower court ruling that rejected voting restrictions in North Carolina only because the Court’s current 4-4 split left the justices evenly divided. The stalemate underscores how the future of voting rights hangs on the high court’s composition.

Andrew Krech/News & Record via AP Voter ID rules posted at the door of the voting station at the Alamance Fire Station in Greensboro, North Carolina, on March 16, 2016. O f all the states that rushed to restrict voting after the Supreme Court’s disastrous 2013 ruling to strike down key Voting Rights Act protections, North Carolina moved the most aggressively. It enacted multiple voter-suppression measures, including voter-ID requirements, restrictions on early voting, and an end to same-day registration, Sunday voting, and pre-registration for teenagers. The day the law was signed, the ACLU and the Southern Coalition for Social Justice filed suit on the grounds that the statute discriminated against minority voters in violation of the 14th and 15th Amendments. After a bumpy ride through the lower courts, the law landed in August before the Supreme Court, which upheld a three-judge federal appeals court panel’s finding that its voter ID-provisions were unconstitutional. As Judge...

(Photo: AP/CQ Roll Call) Protesters march in support of health-care reform on March 9, 2010, in Washington, D.C. L ast week's announcement by Aetna that it would stop selling health insurance in 11 of the 15 states where it offers coverage through public exchanges is not a death blow to the Affordable Care Act, but it’s certainly not good news for President Obama’s signature health-care law. Aetna maintained it was losing hundreds of millions of dollars on the health law’s marketplaces, and the company is one of more than a dozen major insurers that have announced plans to bail out of the exchanges. The failure of the marketplaces to generate robust competition, as Obama had predicted, should focus liberal attention on what many on the left now regard as a major policy objective: establishing a public option for the health insurance exchanges. The Affordable Care Act has been a substantial success on balance, but it also has serious flaws. On the plus side, roughly 20 million people...

Most progressives would rank Citizens United v. FEC as the worst ruling ever handed down by the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts. But five other rulings are turning out to be even more disastrous.

(Photo: AP/Evan Vucci) Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in the foreground arrives before President Barack Obama's 2016 State of the Union Address on Capitol Hill on January 12. I n a by-now familiar applause line, Bernie Sanders told Democrats gathered at the Democratic National Convention last week that the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. FEC ruling is “one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in the history of our country.” And this is not an instance where Sanders conflicts with the conventional wisdom of the party establishment either. Not only Senator Elizabeth Warren but Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton have consistently railed against the case as a symbol of the corporate takeover of democracy, and so have countless grassroots activists. All this makes sense given the extent to which wealthy interests have been permitted to dominate American politics and policy. After all, big money has the potential to disrupt virtually every aspect of the...